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Ex-CIA officer sentenced in leak case

A former Central Intelligence Agency officer who admitted leaking an undercover colleague’s name to a journalist was sentenced to 2½ years in prison Friday, becoming the first employee of the CIA sent to jail for releasing classified information to the media.

John Kiriakou, 48, received the sentence from Judge Leonie Brinkema during a morning hearing at federal court in Alexandria, Va. He entered a guilty plea last fall to a single felony count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by disclosing the name of the officer in email exchanges in 2008 with Matthew Cole, a journalist then working on a book.

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Kiriakou has described himself as a whistleblower, noting that he was the first current or former CIA officer to publicly talk about the use of waterboarding to interrogate terror suspects. However, at Friday’s sentencing hearing, the judge emphatically rejected Kiriakou’s claim to that title.

“This case is not a case about a whistleblower,” Brinkema declared. She said that while she was imposing the 30-month sentence in accordance with the plea deal, her view was that a longer term would have been appropriate.

“I think 30 months, frankly, is way too light,” she said. The judge said that if sentencing were left to her discretion she would have imposed a prison term in accordance with sentencing guidelines that called for a more than eight years confinement.

Brinkema said Kiriakou had “betrayed” the trust the CIA placed in him and put his colleagues at risk. She cited a letter she’d received from the CIA officer Kiriakou pled guilty to identifying.

“That agent’s life has been changed forever,” Brinkema said.

The letter is not public and the officer has not been named in public court papers, but the judge said the disclosure had a dramatic impact on his life. The judge said the officer had gone to such lengths to protect the secrecy of his affiliation with the CIA that several of his family members did not he worked there.

At a news conference after the sentencing, a lawyer advising Kiriakou, Jesselyn Radack, identified the officer as Thomas Fletcher. She said Fletcher’s identity was well known to human rights activists years before Kiriakou’s disclosures and has been published recently in a variety of places, including by Harper’s Magazine.

During Friday’s half-hour court session, the prosecution pointed to interviews Kiriakou gave to reporters in recent months as evidence that he was not truly contrite and was insisting that he did not know that the officer was undercover at the time he disclosed the name.